Historically, few topics have proven to be so controversial in international intellectual property as the protection of geographical indications (GIs). The adoption of TRIPS in 1994 did not resolve disagreements, and countries worldwide continue to quarrel today as to the nature, the scope, and the enforcement of GI protection nationally and internationally. Thus far, however, there is little literature addressing GI protection from the point of view of the Asia-Pacific region, even though countries in this region have actively discussed the topic and in several instances have promoted GIs as a mechanism to foster local development and safeguard local culture. This book, edited by renowned intellectual property scholars, fills the void in the current literature and offers a variety of contributions focusing on the framework and effects of GI protection in the Asia-Pacific region. The book is available as Open Access.

The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the UPOV Convention are increasingly relevant and important. They have technical, social and normative legitimacy and have standardised numerous concepts and practices related to plant varieties and plant breeding. In this book, Jay Sanderson provides the first sustained and detailed account of the Convention. Building upon the idea that it has an open-ended and contingent relationship with scientific, legal, technical, political, social and institutional actors, the author explores the Convention's history, concepts and practices. Part I examines the emergence of the UPOV Convention during the 1950s and its expanding legitimacy in relation to plant variety protection. Part II explores the Convention's key concepts and practices, including plant breeder, plant variety, plant names (denomination), characteristics, protected material, essentially derived varieties (EDV) and farm saved seed (FSS). This book is an invaluable resource for academics, policy makers, agricultural managers and researchers in this field.

Economic growth has traditionally been attributed to the increase in national production arising from technological innovation. Using a panel of seventy-nine countries bridging the North-South divide, Patent Intensity and Economic Growth is an important empirical study on the uncertain relationship between patents and economic growth. It considers the impact of one-size-fits-all patent policies on developing countries and their innovation-based economic growth, including those policies originating from the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization, as well as initiatives derived from the TRIPS Agreement and the Washington Consensus. This book argues against patent harmonization across countries and provides an analytical framework for country group coalitioning on policy at UN level. It will appeal to scholars and students of patent law, national and international policy makers, venture capitalist investors, and research and development managers, as well as researchers in intellectual property, innovation and economic growth.

Copyright and International Negotiations provides a historical study of the development of Chinese copyright law in terms of China's contemporary political economy and the impact that international copyright law has had. The analysis shows how China's copyright system is intertwined with censorship and international copyright law and how this has affected freedom of expression. China still enforces an old censorship regime that clamps down on free expression despite a modern system of copyright rules which should function as an engine of free expression. The book explores the development and architecture of Chinese copyright law in parallel with international copyright law, clarifies China's nuanced patterns of the control of free expression through copyright law, and identifies a breakthrough for neutralising the impact of China's censorship policies through copyright law.

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) play an increasingly prominent role in addressing global development challenges. United Nations agencies and other organizations are relying on PPPs to improve global health, facilitate access to scientific information, and encourage the diffusion of climate change technologies. For this reason, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights their centrality in the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the same time, the intellectual property dimensions and implications of these efforts remain under-examined. Through selective case studies, this illuminating work contributes to a better understanding of the relationships between PPPs and intellectual property considered within a global knowledge governance framework, that includes innovation, capacity-building, technological learning, and diffusion. Linking global governance of knowledge via intellectual property to the SDGs, this is the first book to chart the activities of PPPs at this important nexus.

Central American countries have long defined health as a human right. But in recent years regional trade agreements have ushered in aggressive intellectual property reforms, undermining this conception. Questions of IP and health provisions are pivotal to both human rights advocacy and "free" trade policy, and as this book chronicles, complex political battles have developed across the region.
Looking at events in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, Angelina Godoy argues that human rights advocates need to approach intellectual property law as more than simply a roster of regulations. IP represents the cutting edge of a global tendency to value all things in market terms: Life forms--from plants to human genetic sequences--are rendered commodities, and substances necessary to sustain life--medicines--are restricted to insure corporate profits. If we argue only over the terms of IP protection without confronting the underlying logic governing our trade agreements, then human rights advocates will lose even when they win.

As knowledge production has become a more salient part of the economy, intellectual property laws have expanded. From a backwater of specialists in patent, copyright, and trademark law, intellectual property has become linked to trade through successive international agreements, and appreciated as key to both economic and cultural development. Furthermore, law has begun to engage the interest of economists, political theorists, and human rights advocates. However, because each discipline sees intellectual property in its own way, legal scholarship and practice have diverged, and the debate over intellectual property law has become fragmented. This book is aimed at bringing this diverse scholarship and practice together. It examines intellectual property through successive lenses (incentive theory, trade, development, culture, and human rights) and ends with a discussion of whether and how these fragmented views can be reconciled and integrated.

Edward Snowden's leaks exposed fundamental differences in the ways Americans and Europeans approach the issues of privacy and intelligence gathering. Featuring commentary from leading commentators, scholars and practitioners from both sides of the Atlantic, the book documents and explains these differences, summarized in these terms: Europeans should 'grow up' and Americans should 'obey the law'. The book starts with a collection of chapters acknowledging that Snowden's revelations require us to rethink prevailing theories concerning privacy and intelligence gathering, explaining the differences and uncertainty regarding those aspects. An impressive range of experts reflect on the law and policy of the NSA-Affair, documenting its fundamentally transnational dimension, which is the real location of the transatlantic dialogue on privacy and intelligence gathering. The conclusive chapters explain the dramatic transatlantic differences that emerged from the NSA-Affair with a collection of comparative cultural commentary.

Defamation and privacy are now two central issues in media law. While defamation law has long posed concerns for media publications, the emergence of privacy as a legal challenge has been relatively recent in many common law jurisdictions outside the US. A number of jurisdictions have seen recent defamation and privacy law reforms, which have often drawn on, or reacted against, developments elsewhere. This timely book examines topical issues in defamation and privacy law focused on media, journalism and contemporary communication. Aimed at a wide legal audience, it brings together leading and emerging analysts of media law to address current and proposed reforms and the impact of changes in communication environments, and to re-examine basic principles such as harm and free speech. This book will be of interest to all those working on commonwealth or US law, as well as comparative scholars from wider jurisdictions.

As technology makes it easier for people to work together, large-scale collaboration is becoming increasingly prevalent. In this context, the question of how to determine authorship - and hence ownership - of copyright in collaborative works is an important question to which current copyright law fails to provide a coherent or consistent answer. In Copyright and Collective Authorship, Daniela Simone engages with the problem of how to determine the authorship of highly collaborative works. Employing insights from the ways in which collaborators understand and regulate issues of authorship, the book argues that a recalibration of copyright law is necessary, proposing an inclusive and contextual approach to joint authorship that is true to the legal concept of authorship but is also more aligned with creative reality.

When the idea of copyright was enshrined in the Constitution it was intended to induce citizens to create. Today, however, copyright has morphed into a system that offers the bulk of its protection to a select number of major corporate content providers (or Big Copyright), which has turned us from a country of creators into one of consumers who spend, on average, ten hours each day on entertainment. In this alarming but illuminating book, Martin Skladany examines our culture of overconsumption and shows not only how it leads to addiction, but also how it is unraveling important threads - of family, friendship, and community - in our society. Big Copyright versus the People should be read by anyone interested in understanding how Big Copyright managed to get such a lethal grip on our culture and what can be done to loosen it.

In an era when knowledge can travel with astonishing speed, the need for analysis of intellectual property (IP) law-and its focus on patents, trade secrets, trademarks, and issues of copyright-has never been greater. But as Robert M. Farley and Davida H. Isaacs stress in Patents for Power, we have long overlooked critical ties between IP law and one area of worldwide concern: military technology. This deft blend of case studies, theoretical analyses, and policy advice reveals the fundamental role of IP law in shaping how states create and transmit defense equipment and weaponry. The book probes two major issues: the effect of IP law on innovation itself and the effect of IP law on the international diffusion, or sharing, of technology. Discussing a range of inventions, from the AK-47 rifle to the B-29 Superfortress bomber to the MQ-1 Predator drone, the authors show how IP systems (or their lack) have impacted domestic and international relations across a number of countries, including the United States, Russia, China, and South Korea. The study finds, among other results, that while the open nature of the IP system may encourage industrial espionage like cyberwarfare, increased state uptake of IP law is helping to establish international standards for IP protection. This clear-eyed approach to law and national security is thus essential for anyone interested in history, political science, and legal studies.

In economic sectors crucial to human welfare - agriculture, education, and medicine - a small number of firms control global markets, primarily by enforcing intellectual property (IP) rights incorporated into trade agreements made in the 1980s onward. Such rights include patents on seeds and medicines, copyrights for educational texts, and trademarks in consumer products. According to conventional wisdom, these agreements likewise ended hopes for a 'New International Economic Order,' under which wealth would be redistributed from rich countries to poor. Sam F. Halabi turns this conventional wisdom on its head by demonstrating that the New International Economic Order never faded, but rather was redirected by other treaties, formed outside the nominally economic sphere, that protected poor countries' interests in education, health, and nutrition and resulted in redistribution and regulation. This illuminating work should be read by anyone seeking a nuanced view of how IP is shaping the global knowledge economy.

For many years, there have been discussions about whether intellectual property (IP) is really property. The property concept, particularly when used in transnational and international concepts, remains somewhat elusive. Here, Ole-Andreas Rognstad comprehensively discusses the use of the property metaphor in relation to IP in a transnational perspective. Rognstad gives an overview of main aspects of the IP/property interface, notably the justification and the structuring of the rights and intellectual property rights as assets. Moreover, he highlights the importance of distinguishing between these aspects, even though they are closely linked to each other. The book takes a transnational approach, dealing with recent developments in European human/fundamental rights law and international investment law, helping readers to understand the practical implications of the IP/property interface. This will be valuable reading for academics, practitioners and policy makers working in the area of IP, and lawyers and philosophers interested in the property debate.

In pharmaceutical patent law, the problem of lack of policy direction and inappropriate legal framework is widespread - particularly among jurisdictions with little to no pharmaceutical research or manufacturing. This book aims to inform public policy and influence debate through a comprehensive review of Hong Kong's pharmaceutical patent law. By demonstrating the need for a holistic review of pharmaceutical patent laws and evaluating Hong Kong's system in light of health policy, economic and social factors, Bryan Mercurio recommends changes to the legal framework and constructs a more efficient and effective system for Hong Kong. He thoroughly evaluates the international framework and best practice models to offer a global perspective to each issue before providing local context in the analysis. While the focus of the book is Hong Kong, the analysis on pharmaceutical patent law and policy extends to other jurisdictions facing issues on reforming their national system.

When data from all aspects of our lives can be relevant to our health - from our habits at the grocery store and our Google searches to our FitBit data and our medical records - can we really differentiate between big data and health big data? Will health big data be used for good, such as to improve drug safety, or ill, as in insurance discrimination? Will it disrupt health care (and the health care system) as we know it? Will it be possible to protect our health privacy? What barriers will there be to collecting and utilizing health big data? What role should law play, and what ethical concerns may arise? This timely, groundbreaking volume explores these questions and more from a variety of perspectives, examining how law promotes or discourages the use of big data in the health care sphere, and also what we can learn from other sectors.

For more than two hundred years, copyright in the United States has rested on a simple premise: more copyright will lead to more money for copyright owners, and more money will lead to more original works of authorship. In this important, illuminating book, Glynn Lunney tests that premise by tracking the rise and fall of the sound recording copyright from 1961-2015, along with the associated rise and fall in sales of recorded music. Far from supporting copyright's fundamental premise, the empirical evidence finds the exact opposite relationship: more revenue led to fewer and lower-quality hit songs. Lunney's breakthrough research shows that what copyright does is vastly increase the earnings of our most popular artists and songs, which - net result - means fewer hit songs. This book should be read by anyone interested in how copyright operates in the real world.

In the European Union, courts have been expanding the enforcement of intellectual property rights by employing injunctions to compel intermediaries to provide assistance, despite no allegation of wrongdoing against these parties. These prospective injunctions, designed to prevent future harm, thus hold parties accountable where no liability exists. Effectively a new type of regulatory tool, these injunctions are distinct from the conventional secondary liability in tort. At present, they can be observed in orders to compel website blocking, content filtering, or disconnection, but going forward, their use is potentially unlimited. This book outlines the paradigmatic shift this entails for the future of the Internet and analyzes the associated legal and economic opportunities and problems.

The free exchange of microbial genetic information is an established public good, facilitating research on medicines, agriculture, and climate change. However, over the past quarter-century, access to genetic resources has been hindered by intellectual property claims from developed countries under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement (1994) and by claims of sovereign rights from developing countries under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (1992). In this volume, the authors examine the scientific community's responses to these obstacles and advise policymakers on how to harness provisions of the Nagoya Protocol (2010) that allow multilateral measures to support research. By pooling microbial materials, data, and literature in a carefully designed transnational e-infrastructure, the scientific community can facilitate access to essential research assets while simultaneously reinforcing the open access movement. The original empirical surveys of responses to the CBD included here provide a valuable addition to the literature on governing scientific knowledge commons.

This book presents eleven classic papers by the late Professor Suzanne Scotchmer with introductions by leading economists and legal scholars. This book introduces Scotchmer's life and work; analyses her pioneering contributions to the economics of patents and innovation incentives, with a special focus on the modern theory of cumulative innovation; and describes her pioneering work on law and economics, evolutionary game theory, and general equilibrium/club theory. This book also provides a self-contained introduction to students who want to learn more about the various fields that Professor Scotchmer worked in, with a particular focus on patent incentives and cumulative innovation.

Governing Medical Knowledge Commons makes three claims: first, evidence matters to innovation policymaking; second, evidence shows that self-governing knowledge commons support effective innovation without prioritizing traditional intellectual property rights; and third, knowledge commons can succeed in the critical fields of medicine and health. The editors' knowledge commons framework adapts Elinor Ostrom's groundbreaking research on natural resource commons to the distinctive attributes of knowledge and information, providing a systematic means for accumulating evidence about how knowledge commons succeed. The editors' previous volume, Governing Knowledge Commons, demonstrated the framework's power through case studies in a diverse range of areas. Governing Medical Knowledge Commons provides fifteen new case studies of knowledge commons in which researchers, medical professionals, and patients generate, improve, and share innovations, offering readers a practical introduction to the knowledge commons framework and a synthesis of conclusions and lessons. The book is also available as Open Access.

Perspectives on Patentable Subject Matter brings together leading scholars to offer diverse perspectives on the question of which types of subject matter are even eligible for patent protection, setting aside the widely known requirement that a claimed invention avoid the prior art and be adequately disclosed. Some leading commentators and policy-making bodies and individuals envision patentable subject matter to include anything under the sun made by humans, others envision a range of restrictions for particular fields of endeavor, from business methods and computer software to matters involving life, such as DNA and methods for screening or treating disease. Employing approaches that are both theoretically rigorous and grounded in the real world, this book is well suited for practicing lawyers, managers, lawmakers and analysts, as well as academics researching or teaching in law schools, business schools, public policy schools, and in economics and political science departments.

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. This collection of essays, featuring twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools, showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field while highlighting its many new directions. New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the methodological choices that have affected the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of approaches from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and expansion beyond text to performance and the image. Others grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law's construction of racialized bodies. The volume is designed to be a course book that is accessible to undergraduates and law students as well as relevant to academics with an interest in law and the humanities. The essays are simultaneously intended to be introductory and addressed to experts in law and literature. More than any other existing book in the field, New Directions furnishes a guide to the most exciting new work in law and literature while also situating that work within more established debates and conversations.

Celebrities can sell anything from cars to clothing, and we are constantly fascinated by their influence over our lifestyle choices. This book makes an important contribution to legal scholarship about the laws governing the commercial appropriation of fame. Exploring the right of publicity in the US and the passing off action in the UK and Australia, David Tan demonstrates how an appreciation of the production, circulation and consumption of fame can be incorporated into a pragmatic framework to further the understanding of the laws protecting the commercial value of the celebrity personality. Using contemporary examples such as social media and appropriation art, Tan shows how present challenges for the law may be addressed using this cultural framework. This book will be of interest to intellectual property law academics, judges, practitioners and students in the US and common law jurisdictions, as well as those in the field of cultural studies.

Owning Ideas is a comprehensive account of the emergence of the concept of intellectual property in the United States during the long nineteenth century. In the modern information era, intellectual property has become a central economic and cultural phenomenon, and an important lever for allocating wealth and power. This book uncovers the intellectual origins of this modern concept of private property in ideas through a close study of its emergence within the two most important areas of this field: patent and copyright. By placing the development of legal concepts within their social context, this study reconstructs the radical transformation of the idea. Our modern notion of owning ideas, it argues, came into being when the ideals of eighteenth-century possessive individualism at the heart of early patent and copyright were subjected to the forces and ideology of late-nineteenth-century corporate liberalism.